Abstract

Review of ¡Marcha! Latino Chicago and the Immigrant Rights Movement Studies in Social Justice Volume 4, Issue 2, 217-218, 2010 Correspondence Address: Carlos Sandoval García, Instituto de Investigaciones Sociales, Universidad de Costa Rica, Apartado Postal 4920-60, Ciudad Rodrigo Facio, San José, Costa Rica. Tel. (506) 2511-8690, Email: [email protected] ISSN: 1911-4788 Review of ¡Marcha! Latino Chicago and the Immigrant Rights Movement CARLOS SANDOVAL GARCÍA Instituto de Investigaciones Sociales, Universidad de Costa Rica ¡Marcha! Latino Chicago and the Immigrant Rights Movement. By Amalia Pallares and Nilda Flores-González (editors) (2010) Illinois: University of Illinois University Press, 279 pp. ¡Marcha! begins by offering a political and historical context and is organized around three key themes: institutions, agency, and subjectivities. Chapters on institutions look at churches, schools, and trade unions from which many of the mobilizations took shape. The section on agency explores ways in which migrants and Latinos negotiated their mobilizations both within their own organizations as well as with those institutions (e.g. schools) whose permission they needed to join the marches. The third section, subjectivities, looks at the ways in which subjective positions influenced the decision to join the mobilizations while positions were being shaped by the process of participating in the demonstrations. A key conclusion that can be drawn from the chapters included in ¡Marcha! is that the 2006 mobilizations were not spontaneous. Rather, they were the consequence of years of initiatives taken by a diverse array of individuals and organizations at different scales. To ignore this would mean to subscribe to simplistic interpretations which frequently represent migrant mobilization as the “awakening of the sleeping giant,” as if such mobilizations occurred in a political vacuum. Nor can these impressive mobili

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